Git 1.8.2.3 / 1.8.3 RC 2

Developer: License / Price: Size / OS: Binary Format: Last Updated: Category: Git Team | More programs GPL / FREE 15.9 MB / Mac OS X 10.6 or later Intel only May 16th, 2013, 04:58 UTC [view history] Home / Developer Tools

Git is an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency, but just as well suited for small personal repositories.

Git is especially popular in the open source community, serving as a development platform for projects like the Linux Kernel, WINE or X.org.

Git falls in the category of distributed source code management tools, similar to e.g. Mercurial or Bazaar. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Still, Git stays extremely fast and space efficient.

Besides providing a version control system, Git also provides a generic low-level toolkit for directory content management and tree history storage. Traditionally, the toolkit is called the plumbing.

Aside the user interface coming with Git itself, several other projects (so-called porcelains) offer compatible version control interfaces.

Here are some key features of "Git":

· Distributed development. Like most other modern version control systems, Git gives each developer a local copy of the entire development history, and changes are copied from one such repository to another. These changes are imported as additional development branches, and can be merged in the same way as a locally developed branch. Repositories can be easily accessed via the efficient Git protocol (optionally wrapped in ssh for authentication and security) or simply using HTTP - you can publish your repository anywhere without any special webserver configuration required.
· Strong support for non-linear development. Git supports rapid and convenient branching and merging, and includes powerful tools for visualizing and navigating a non-linear development history.
· Efficient handling of large projects. Git is very fast and scales well even when working with large projects and long histories. It is commonly an order of magnitude faster than most other version control systems, and several orders of magnitude faster on some operations. It also uses an extremely efficient packed format for long-term revision storage that currently tops any other open source version control system.
· Cryptographic authentication of history. The Git history is stored in such a way that the name of a particular revision (a "commit" in Git terms) depends upon the complete development history leading up to that commit. Once it is published, it is not possible to change the old versions without it being noticed. Also, tags can be cryptographically signed.
· Toolkit design. Following the Unix tradition, Git is a collection of many small tools written in C, and a number of scripts that provide convenient wrappers. Git provides tools for both convenient human usage and easy scripting to perform new clever operations.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Fixes since v1.8.2.2:
· "rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into the input buffer around as human readable object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in error output.
· When "git difftool" drove "kdiff3", it mistakenly passed --auto option that was meant while resolving merge conflicts.
· "git remote add" command did not diagnose extra command line arguments as an error and silently ignored them.
· Also contains a handful of trivial code clean-ups, documentation
· updates, updates to the test suite, etc.

Via: Git 1.8.2.3 / 1.8.3 RC 2